3 ms·

Middle manager in Germany here, curious about what makes management in the US so successful or distinct - are you able to elaborate? I did notice that most of

by _1tan 7y ago

Middle manager in Germany here, curious about what makes management in the US so successful or distinct - are you able to elaborate? I did notice that most of my management knowledge seems to originate in the US; very little original thoughts from other areas.

hogFeast 7y ago
Your tone is indicative of the problem. If you view a good idea as a "US" idea then that is part of the problem. An idea is a good or bad regardless of who said it (I am in the UK, this happens all the time in UK companies...status and rank are everything, junior people can't have good ideas so off the cliff we go). The general difference is, imo, a more meritocratic society (ref the point above) but also a far deeper understanding of a business and what it is for (in the UK, most people who run businesses have no idea...although it is rarer now, I have talked to CEOs of publicly-listed billion pound companies who have no idea how to measure capital in their business, no idea how to measure returns or even what those measures mean...it is a clown show). The latter is a function of MBA training (you can get all this info yourself btw by just reading), lower share of family-owned businesses (this is a correlated factor, family-owned businesses in the US actually tend to be very well run...in Europe, they are far worse), and the importance of capital markets (in somewhere like Germany, all you need to do is impress your banker, most German bankers are clueless, and they will lend to you even if your business in insolvent...unsurprisingly, Germany's banking sector now looks insolvent so that process is inefficient...capital markets don't always work well but they impose far more discipline). Btw, there is a lot of research on this if you Google. Which I am sure is far more insightful than my random anecdotes and generalisations.
- telotortium 7y ago
  What keywords should I search for? "us vs europe management quality" didn't result in anything obvious.
  - hogFeast 7y ago
    https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/2018/the-uks-productivity-problem-hub-no-spokes-speech-by-andy-haldane https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/201... - by the BOE Chief Economist which refs some papers (the BOE also has papers they have done by it will take me a while to dig them out). The family management stuff should be easy to find but - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0929119904000252 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092911990... - is an example.
throwaway_law 7y ago
>are you able to elaborate? He must be taking pride in the fact that managers grind employees into dust in the US...US managers have overseen the removal of employee benefits like health insurance and pensions, managers have kept worker wages stagnant decade after decade...meanwhile worker efficiency is at record highs, profits are at at record highs, executive compensation is at all time highs, and there has never been a wider gap in executive compensation vs employee compensation.

by _1tan 7y ago

hogFeast 7y ago

Your tone is indicative of the problem. If you view a good idea as a "US" idea then that is part of the problem. An idea is a good or bad regardless of who said it (I am in the UK, this happens all the time in UK companies...status and rank are everything, junior people can't have good ideas so off the cliff we go). The general difference is, imo, a more meritocratic society (ref the point above) but also a far deeper understanding of a business and what it is for (in the UK, most people who run businesses have no idea...although it is rarer now, I have talked to CEOs of publicly-listed billion pound companies who have no idea how to measure capital in their business, no idea how to measure returns or even what those measures mean...it is a clown show). The latter is a function of MBA training (you can get all this info yourself btw by just reading), lower share of family-owned businesses (this is a correlated factor, family-owned businesses in the US actually tend to be very well run...in Europe, they are far worse), and the importance of capital markets (in somewhere like Germany, all you need to do is impress your banker, most German bankers are clueless, and they will lend to you even if your business in insolvent...unsurprisingly, Germany's banking sector now looks insolvent so that process is inefficient...capital markets don't always work well but they impose far more discipline). Btw, there is a lot of research on this if you Google. Which I am sure is far more insightful than my random anecdotes and generalisations.

telotortium 7y ago
What keywords should I search for? "us vs europe management quality" didn't result in anything obvious.
- hogFeast 7y ago
  https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/2018/the-uks-productivity-problem-hub-no-spokes-speech-by-andy-haldane https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/201... - by the BOE Chief Economist which refs some papers (the BOE also has papers they have done by it will take me a while to dig them out). The family management stuff should be easy to find but - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0929119904000252 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092911990... - is an example.

throwaway_law 7y ago

>are you able to elaborate? He must be taking pride in the fact that managers grind employees into dust in the US...US managers have overseen the removal of employee benefits like health insurance and pensions, managers have kept worker wages stagnant decade after decade...meanwhile worker efficiency is at record highs, profits are at at record highs, executive compensation is at all time highs, and there has never been a wider gap in executive compensation vs employee compensation.